Desire: How We Love Heal and Grow with Jay Stringer

Are you struggling to understand the deep longings within you, feeling trapped in your marriage, or like the spark has gone dim? In this episode, we welcome back author and licensed therapist Jay Stringer to discuss his groundbreaking new book, Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow. 

We talk with Jay and explore what motivated him to write this book, and his research on how understanding your desire dramatically impacts relationships.  Discover how to stop sabotaging your relationship, differentiate from your partner to create a stronger connection, and move from a "freedom from" mindset to a "freedom for" purpose. This conversation is a transformative call to confront your past, heal attachment wounds, and use the disruptive power of desire to build a life and marriage that truly make you come alive.

Interested in exploring your story around unwanted desire? Brad is launching a new Unwanted Journey group with Jay's first book later this month. Find out more

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Transcript

Brad Aldrich 0:03

Welcome to the Still Becoming One podcast. We are Brad and Katie.

Kate Aldrich 0:09

In our more than 25 years of marriage, we've held on through dark times and good times. We've experienced rupture and restoration.

Brad Aldrich 0:17

Now, as a licensed marriage counselor and relationship coaches, we help individuals and couples regain hope and move towards healing.

Kate Aldrich 0:27

We invite you to journey with us as we are still becoming one.

Brad Aldrich 0:31

Let's start the conversation. Hello and welcome back to Still Becoming One, everyone. We are so glad that you're here today. We're really excited because we are joined again by our friend Jay Stringer, who is a licensed therapist, a researcher, the author of the great book Unwanted. And now Jay has a brand new book out called Desire. It's the longings inside us and the new science of how we love, heal, and grow. We're so excited to have Jay back on Still Becoming One as he helps us to understand this whole thing about desire. So thanks so much for coming, Jay.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Brad, Kate, so good to be back with you all. Thank you for having me back on your show.

Kate Aldrich 1:24

Oh my goodness, we're honored. So thanks for joining us in this busy time.

Brad Aldrich 1:29

Absolutely. Yeah. So the the book actually comes out the first week of March in 2026. So it should be on shelves by the time this hits air. Um, and we're so excited to have gotten a little bit of an advanced peak of some of what you're sharing with people. There is a whole lot here about us trying to understand desire. So tell us, even just start, what got you going? I want to better understand this idea of desire, Jay.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

Yeah, so after Unwanted was released, I feel like part of what that book did was that it struck a nerve in terms of people just getting curious about why they do self-destructive things. And they would just offer like ridiculous things like$15 Venmo if Jay can interpret this thing. So I knew that that book had kind of struck a nerve in terms of uh resisting some of the kind of paradigms of our time, which are either just the suppression of desire or just kind of indulge it as if there's no meaning associated with it. But part of what Unwanted could not do was people were still going back into the same marriage that they were in, uh, or they were returning back to their family of origin or still feeling deeply lonely in their careers. We also got a lot of people writing in to us saying, you know, helpful uh for my husband or my spouse with regard to unwanted sexual behavior, but what do I do if I feel like I have a defibrillator for my sex life? Or what do I do if I'm trying to address, you know, family of origin in the context of marriage? Uh, what do I do with kind of just feeling like the light has gone dim in my eyes and I don't know how to make my life work? So I started realizing that this isn't just about kind of developing insight on one particular self-destructive pattern, but really what if we could get under the machinery of desire itself? Like, how does desire form? And we all know this. Like, desire has the potential to turn you into the best version of yourself, the best spouse, or it can turn you into the worst, most self-absorbed version of yourself. And I that's uh that's a very powerful distinction that if desire really is that powerful, why are we leaving our formation to chance? And so uh, you know, did more research, um, more investigation with regard to what did my clients need, what did my own marriage need? And so that's how I landed on the topic of desire, which was, you know, they say this about creative ideas where you have that initial idea that launches it, and then very quickly you realize you're way too deep over your head. So a little bit of that in this project too. Yeah, oh, I can imagine.

Kate Aldrich 4:57

I I felt that in the book, like it is very deep and it's very complex, and it's like I almost said to Brad, like, I'm gonna need time to contemplate a lot of what was in there. Some is very um, very just profound and easy to intake, and then others it's like, well, I I have to spend time thinking about myself and how that applies and what it applies to. But it's so good. So I'm thankful you took that dive, even though I'm sure it was way more and deeper than you intended or thought it might be from the beginning.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Yeah, there were portions of unwanted and just the process and kind of some of you know breaking ground with some of the ideas that created a lot of uh drama around post-release and kind of people coming after me for different ideas. This one has been kind of initiating my own midlife chrysalis. Like, definitely don't feel like I'm in a crisis, but uh my own desires and kind of just that concept of provisional self and who I was and how you know some of my gifts and my identity led me to be a therapist, led me to my wife. Um, all of that is really beginning to break down. And so it's been kind of an interesting read on, you know, I wrote Unwanted after I felt like I had had some really good insight. I had outgrown porn and some of my own self-destructive behaviors there. But this one on desire is like, wow, I am a complete work in progress. And this book is reading me just as much as I have written it.

Brad Aldrich 6:35

I I mean, that's I'm really glad you said that, Jay. Because I like reading this. I mean, admittedly, we got an advanced copy and I'm reading it, going, oh, I get to interview Jay in a couple of days. I want to know enough to get ideas to ask him questions. And then I kept kind of coming along things of like, oh, wait, I gotta think about that for myself.

Kate Aldrich 6:56

Yeah.

Brad Aldrich 6:56

Oh man, wait a minute. How how does that work? And you know, hitting this, and I kept going, all right, I'm gonna have to reread this with a with that mind of man, I've got to really study my own history of how I learned desire. Yes, we do talk about well, and I'll I'll keep going. And like you talk about and you present kind of this two opposing sides that often you end up seeing. It's the family that was taught that desires aren't healthy, we're not allowed to have desires, since it's even sinful, or it's ignored. But then there's this opposite of the kids' desires are so present that it runs the family, and like they don't even have to work for their desires, it just shows up. And just talking about those two extremes. I I'm curious how you have seen those patterns um play out in adults.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

Yeah, you know, the the first one I would say is more common in terms of what tends to find me, that there is some level of suspicion around desire. And it could be because they came from a faith-based family that did frame desire as something that was selfish, that was easily going to turn you into, you know, the worst version of yourself, God forbid you might have sexual desires as well. And so the framework was often suppression, but it you don't just need a faith-based family to have that approach. There's just so many people that if you wanted a particular thing of Legos, uh I Ron Rollheiser would say that uh all children are born with these raw desires. And so these raw desires are, you know, they're unformed. And so when children first start presenting what they want to the world, it's not gonna come out uh very clean, it's not gonna come out developed. And I think most people's response to that is to try and shut it down, to shame it. Um see that quite a bit. And then I think increasingly there is some sense of over-indexing on trying to give a kid every desire. So there's this sense of, you know, I come from a history, I see this more in parents now, where they come from a family of origin that deprived them of their needs, made desire bad. And so now they want to change the story and kind of just as that old proverb goes, you know, don't prepare the child for the road, but prepare the road for the child. That's kind of what they're doing, is they're preparing the road, they're trying to smooth everything out and not really allowing their kid to kind of move through the resistance and difficulty that's needed to actually develop. So uh, but I would say most of my practice, a lot of the coaching that I do is all around just people having some level of suppression of desire.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Yeah.

Brad Aldrich 10:13

I I see, I think we see that all the time. I think you're right. I tend to see that I kind of highlighted that section and went, I I think this is way overgeneralized, but I think there is that cultural kind of thing that happened that Gen X maybe is a little bit more in that suppression of desire. We didn't have anyone thinking about our desires, where then we flipped and raised Gen Z kids who got snowplowed so that that you know, anything that they need want came to them very easily. And, you know, there's some interesting differences there.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

And now many of them like, I mean, just some of those former metrics of kind of adolescence, like they're having less sex, they don't want their driver's license. Like, in some ways, some parents are like, well, this kid just have some desires, like outside of just screens or dissociation. And so, just you know, just that great phrase from Jonathan Hyatt, like so many kids today have had a phone-based childhood, not a play-based childhood. And so a lot of those desires become directed towards tech and towards dissociation, not towards you know, risks that all of us need to take during our own adolescence. Yeah.

Kate Aldrich 11:36

Gosh, yeah.

Brad Aldrich 11:38

And you share in the beginning of the book, you share a great story of your son teaching you something about desire and him actually turning around and wanting to destroy something of yours. Do you want to tell some of that story? Because just so one.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Yep. Yeah. So this happened, I think, when my son was around seven, and it was it during the pandemic because we were about to move from Seattle, Washington to New York City, and my parents did not want my childhood junk in their home anymore. And so they basically dropped off this giant blue bin at our house for me to go through to sort through like, what do I want to bring to New York? What do I want to just get rid of? And it was right around that time where my son just started pushing back against like every direct request I made, any idea I had. He was just like, it was like a clay pigeon in the sky that he was just shooting down and having kind of some fun with it. And I remember there was this like billboard behind our house that said essentially like every egg takes about a hundred and or every egg takes about 50 gallons of water to create, or something like that. And so he had taken these like three eggs and had just like thrown them against the fence and was like, I just wasted 150 gallons of water. And you know, that's childhood is the sense of like raw desire. Um but we were just bumping heads all the time, uh, clashing. And so eventually my wife Heather looked at me and was like, you need to leave the house. And here's what you need to do. You need to go figure out like what your son is triggering inside of you. And I don't want you coming back home until you have some answers. So I was essentially exiled, kicked out of my own home. And part of what I started grappling with was really, I would say my provisional self that growing up, my older sister played that role. She challenged virtually everything that my parents said and did. She was the classic pastor's daughter rebel. My older brother was the philosophical rebel, like was reading Nietzsche at 16, critiquing my parents' parenting, their church. But I was kind of the golden child, the kid that tried to make my dad's life, my mom's life, my family life easier. And so I think part of what I was being cornered with in my son's beautiful defiance was I never got to live out this story of challenge. I never got to rebel in this classic sense in front of everyone. My rebellion always went underground. I could never bring it to my mom, to my dad, uh, and you know, waste water. Um, we were conserving everything in our family. And so just that sense of being able to go back to my son to say, hey, like I have made your desire really bad to disrupt, and it's not. Um, you want to disrupt, and it's one of the most beautiful things about you. And so I said, um, instead of kind of asking you not to destroy things, how about you and I pick something every week to destroy together? And he got this like just bright smile and this kind of uh you know laugh. And it he thought about it and he said, Can we destroy your trophies? And what he was referring to is this whole blue bin had been full of all of my childhood and high school trophies. I I need to nuance this with an asterisk of I had a lot of trophies, uh, because I was a decent athlete, but far more. I went to a uh small Southern Baptist high school that they used to say the best ability is availability. So like there were not cuts to teams, like everybody made these teams. So I had, you know, a lot of uh, you know, they would have ridiculous awards like the Barnabas Award or the Male Christian Athlete of the Year Award, or um, and then when I was in my junior or senior year, uh I created a science project that was called hydrogen-based technology for a cleaner, more sustainable environment. And so that won like second place in the state of Virginia. So that was the one that he wanted to grab, was my science fair project from the state of Virginia. And he put it on a uh stone and then grabbed my high school baseball bat and just completely whacked the thing. Wow. And the trophy just shattered into like hundreds of pieces. And I will never forget his laugh. And he just said, Your trophies are made of cheap plastic. And it was like, you know, in that moment of like, damn, that is what children are. Children destroy the trophies, yeah, the idols of their parents and expose them. And so I think rather than just framing his childhood desire for disruption as something bad, it really confronted something of my own childhood where I was never really able to rebel. Wow.

Kate Aldrich 17:13

That's huge.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

In public, I should say.

Kate Aldrich 17:16

In public, sure. Sure. Wow.

Brad Aldrich 17:20

And it, I think there's so much there, and you highlight how well parenting pushes in some of those buttons of you know, what you learned, what was expected, what you had to do, what you were allowed to do, it, you know, all of this learning about desire. The other relationship that you highlight throughout the book that does that is marriage. And I think that's something Kate and I have said often is marriage shows you so much about yourself. And you know, you kind of talk about it as uh a place of a great opportunity to learn about our desires. Tell us a little bit more about how you learned desire, this whole thing plays out in marriages.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Yeah, so going back to that provisional self concept, um, that you know, a provisional self is not your fully developed sense of self, it's not your true self. It's a sense of who you needed to become in order to survive your world. And so, you know, when I think about some of the early dating experiences that I had with, you know, my now wife, but also ex-girlfriends, it would be part of that sense of I would always try and present myself as someone who was kind of good and kind, uh, someone who read their story well, someone who could synthesize aspects of their childhood that they hadn't quite seen before, get to offer them something of like a template of a kind, curious man that they had not received before. Then after I started dating them, all of the darkness, the shadow, the entitlement, the anger would begin to be unleashed. And so part of what I would begin to play out, I would say is like a reenactment of my family of origin, that for my mom, that was the role that I played. Is that when my dad, who was a pastor minister, would go and attend to his pastoral duties, I would check in to see how my mom was doing, uh, to be able to kind of see where was she sad, where was she angry, and present my caring questions to her to help things go better in our family. But I was never really able to bring my anger, my rage to my family. And that doesn't just disappear, it goes somewhere. All of those longings for attachment, those longings for a sense of being uh cared for, to be seen, to be safe, to be so secure. Well, I became a tyrant in relationships because I had never addressed those realities. So part of what marriage was creating for me was, you know, at one level a desire to reenact the past, but then also a desire to uh have someone see me, read me, engage me, want me in a way that no one else had before. And so that created madness for myself and far more for my wife. And so that was part of the sense of, you know, part of what I'm saying in desire is that that point in your marriage where you feel like all is lost, that moment where you feel like my marriage sucks and something is not working. Part of the way that I've begun thinking about that is like, is it possible that at that exact moment your marriage is actually working perfectly well to reveal to you what needs to be confronted, either in yourself, in your partner, or in both of you together? And so that's been kind of something of the game changer for me is to allow the madness, the difficulties in my marriage to expose and help me to confront some of the places that I've been avoiding addressing within my own life, my own development, my own desires. And so, you know, unfortunately for Heather, you know, just middle age male loneliness, single greatest health factor facing American men, I have all of these attachment wounds, all of these places. Of loneliness as a middle-aged man, a lot of just difficulties that I am going through personally in midlife, that's a whole lot for a wife to have to begin to bear. And so that sense of if I'm not taking my desires towards healing, desires towards my own development, desires towards intimacy with dear friends, desire for meaning and purpose with my life, I'm going to over-index almost all of my desire into my marriage. And my marriage is going to crumble under the weight of all those expectations that it was never intended to bear. And so that's where, you know, similar, you'll you'll notice something similar and desire to unwanted, but our problems are some of the greatest gifts. If we're willing to listen and study them, the problem is we don't like to have our problems and our shortcomings and the places that we are underdeveloped be revealed. And yet it's so essential that we learn to study them.

Brad Aldrich 23:05

Yeah. Yeah, it's so good. It's so good. And really just I see this extreme all the time that you're highlighting of there are some relationships that they literally expect their spouse to meet all of their needs, and then it crumbles because it can't. And then on the other side, it's the they're so distant, they're getting all their needs met from work or whatever other things that they feel incredibly disengaged and distant in their relationship, and they're not bringing any of that desire to that person. And like those extremes, I think, do often talk about what ends up happening in couples so to that end up getting divorced if they don't figure out how to deal with some of those pressures.

Kate Aldrich 23:57

Yeah, the invitation that it is. But I I get for couples, it doesn't feel like an like it's not the way we typically view an invitation. Um, but it is a beautiful invitation. And I even love that you you said, like, actually, my marriage is working the way it should. Whereas I think typically we tend to see, oh, this is telling me something's wrong, something's bad, we're not compatible, all those things, instead of, huh? Okay, this is happening between the two of us, or for me, or for for my spouse, like what's going on? Like, can I actually seek to understand so that we can, I can grow the way I need to, and and then the two of us can, I think is is huge. The way you've articulated a lot of it is just really, I think, um super helpful because I think that what I just stated is as is a movement that is coming along with a lot of people looking at marriage, which I'm thankful for. But there is still that, okay, how do I dig in? How do I own what's mine? How do we meet? What does the meeting in the middle mean and look like? And and right, and how do we grow our marriage from there? And I think that can often then be, I hear you, I just don't know what what that looks like. And I think that's the really unique.

SPEAKER_02 25:24

Yeah. So think about like a good marriage as this interplay between authenticity and connection. And that's part of what Dan Siegel would say like the strongest systems in the world are those that are differentiated and meaningfully linked. Yeah. And so part of the challenge of a lot of marriages these days is that we we know that we are made for union, that we're made to feel connected to someone. But I think part of what the church has done, part of what culture has done is to over-index on unity, over-index on togetherness and completely abdicate the role of what it means to differentiate. And you know, differentiation is taken from cell biology that essentially like a plant needs to grow, to differentiate in order to uh it needs to differentiate and divide in order for the growth of the organism. So think about like the human body that we start similar genetic material, but then the cells differentiate and divide. And so we have ears, nose, smell, um, touch, taste, like all of these wildly differentiated aspects of our body. But the point of our senses is not just that, like, oh, I can see and I can hear. It's the it's it's the integration between all of them. And so part of what I will often experience with most marriages is they often have a uh an immense desire for connection, but they don't have the same desire to differentiate and to understand who they are apart from their spouse. Yeah. And so if you don't know who you are, if you don't know your identity, if you don't desire to know your story or desire to have meaning and purpose in your life, inevitably what you're gonna end up doing is bringing a laundry list of unmet needs and desires to your partner rather than an invitation to an adventure. And again, not to say that you can't bring your childhood wounds and some of those attachment patterns to a marriage. Of course, those are gonna be present. But we need to be able to bring more than that. And so the example I always work with with couples is I want you to think about your marriage as like a symphony. That if you were to go into any major city, you're in Philadelphia, you're in New York, you're in LA, you want your violinist to be the most developed, differentiated, individuated violinist in the city. Same thing for your percussion team, for Woodwinds, for your cellist. You want them to not have abdicated the work, not say, well, I just didn't really feel like showing up today. Like you want the hours that they have put in to develop who they are. But when you go into a symphony, you're not like, wow, that clarinet was amazing. I mean, maybe, but it's it's the sense of wow, that was such a stunning experience to have all of these differentiated unique instruments come together to create music. And that's what a good marriage looks like is you know, it's a differentiated person who brings their instrument, who brings their passion, their desire, their identity, and then finds a way to create meaningful connections. And, you know, that's what a good marriage is, that's what the Trinity is. Um, like we have so much of this in our background, but we keep asking, I think, for a vision of intimacy that looks far more codependent and enmeshed than is actually one capable of intimacy. And so that's, you know, as I heard you all talk about reading desire and having to think about this for yourselves, that's that's one of those big concepts that I'm working through is you you have to desire your own personal growth and differentiation because all desires that follow, whether it's intimacy, sex, purpose, they're all gonna come out of that capacity for self-development. Yeah.

Kate Aldrich 29:42

Yeah.

Brad Aldrich 29:43

You you actually say, I I just wrote this down because I love this quote. Um we feel trapped by our partner's need to remain connected. But if we leave, we fear being alone or hated. Thankfully, we don't have to choose between being confined, isolated, or crushed. Marriage, unlike any other relationship on earth, pushes us to learn how to remain authentic to ourselves while also belonging to the one we love.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

That is a yeah, the background of that is um the Simpsons movie. I think that's the paragraph before. But it's there's like, I don't know which character it is, but basically this dome is descending over the fictional town of Springfield, and this guy has to decide like, you know, do I run outside of the dome or do I stay trapped inside? And you see him just running back and forth, back and forth of like, if I leave this town, I'm all alone. But if I stay, I'm trapped. And yeah, in that indecision, he is crushed in his ambivalence. And so I experience that a lot with couples that are navigating like, do we stay together? Do we get divorced? How do we work through this? Is you know, if I stay in this marriage, I feel trapped in these patterns. I might be trapped with someone that I feel like I don't really love anymore, or maybe we got married before we had brain development and our prefrontal cortex wasn't even developed at that point. Uh, so maybe I need to leave. But if I leave, am I making the right decision or am I staying for the wrong decision? So marriage just kind of corners you real fast with what why are you in your marriage? And it's a really good question if it's allowed to be kind and curious.

Kate Aldrich 31:34

I love that. I love that. Yeah, because I I think for many that question feels really dangerous, yeah, scary. Like, yeah. Like, what what if I put my foot in that and I try to um access that? What is that gonna mean? But I think it really can lead to really good things. Yeah.

Brad Aldrich 31:55

I think so many couples see it as potential rejection, potential abandonment, potential, like they the fears of all of those things keep people from going. Well, wait, why where's the delight? Where where's the positive? Where why am I here? Oh, I'm I'm here because of this great unity, yeah, rather than just interdependence that we've come to get used to, but has nothing to do with anything of desire.

Kate Aldrich 32:27

I think too, there's a lack of good information and education, you know, because we have the world, I think we also have what the church portrays, and I think there's I think specifically in the church, I see a lack, we don't know what to do with these hard questions, which I see as so good. So we just shut them down. And then we have the world trying to engage them in a way sometimes better, honestly. Um, and so then there becomes this, well, I don't actually know how to reconcile that question or even how to enter in in a way that my church isn't gonna judge me and think you shouldn't even be thinking this thing, and the world isn't gonna give me an option that maybe is something I'm uncomfortable with or whatever. Um, and I so I do think there's also this space of that question you're asking, as as Brad just said, dangerous. Like it just feels wrong. It feels like I'm doing something wrong. Um, and yet, you know, kindness and curiosity are huge in any space. Yeah. And so I think being able to ask yourself that why am I in my marriage? And I think you brought it really good in the book. Like it's it that's going to change over time, not the fundamental of why I'm in my marriage, but how we grow, how we change. It's going to, I'm, I am not the same person who married Brad 26 years ago. And thank goodness, right? Like for myself and for him, I think he's over there agreeing. Um right. So like it's going to change. And we, and that's, I think also sometimes people feel a little bit exhausted with, oh, so I have to keep engaging this. To some extent, absolutely. We're never done engaging it. Right. And I think that's a really good thing. Absolutely. I think also sometimes it's a really exhausting thing. I get that. Um, but yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:22

Yeah. One of the the concepts that I work with with couples is, you know, this difference between like a capital D divorce and a lowercase D divorce. So I would say all of us need to have, we we need to divorce ourselves from destructive patterns. So most of what I experience is people think about that capital D legal divorce long before they have had a lot of integrity with regard to what are the patterns, what are the dynamics that I need to divorce myself from. And every marriage has them. So, you know, part of what we found in the research is, you know, if you were enmeshed with your family of origin, you were something like three times more likely to have a significant romantic conflict. And so just think about that notion of what does it mean to become one? Well, you need to leave your mother and father in order to join together with your partner. And part of what happens is, you know, you might leave your mother and father uh gratefully, uh, you might leave them with lament. But some people hate their mothers and fathers, but they are still loyal to them in the way that they live. So if their family of origin wasn't a place of connection and intimacy, and they learned how to dissociate to get through life, well, they show up in marriage doing the same thing. They're still underdeveloped in intimacy, and they continue to dissociate. And part of what I would claim is you're actually still being loyal to your mother and father that you don't like. And so that sense of what does it mean to leave loyalty to your family of origin is so necessary. So we need to divorce ourselves from the pattern of prioritizing our mothers and our fathers, the strategies that we deployed to get us through life. That could be a divorce. Um, you know, I think of just some of the places in my own marriage where I have expected my wife to carry a lot of my unmet needs and longings and be available for me. I have had to divorce myself many times of my own idolatry and demands on her life to be able to actually desire what she desires. And she has so much creativity, so much life. And so part of what I've had to reconnect with is, you know, one of the reasons why I fell in love with her was because she was different, was because she was separate. But every time she leaves town, it I have way more responsibilities and things I have to attend to. And I'm thinking right now about just like our we have this burnadoodle, mini burnadoodle, that is like anxious, high needs, teddy bear, so sweet. But I'm like, I don't like that my wife gets out of town just because I have more dog responsibilities. What is wrong with me that I am at some level, like I would prefer my wife to not engage life and desire and the work that she does in the world because of my selfish needs around a burn a doodle. But it's that's part of that sense of, you know, if I just stay entitled, if I I'm setting the compass heading for a capital D divorce. But if I can learn how to divorce myself from patterns that are inhibiting intimacy and inhibiting my wife from developing her desires. Sure. So that has been such a redemptive arc in our marriage is we set each other free so consistently to prioritize the desires inside of us. And I think it's created so much oxygen, but it also creates disruption. And that's absolutely you know crucial for us to understand about desire is desire will be disruptive, but that does not mean that it's bad. It's to want something, to chase after something, to pursue something is going to disrupt your life and those around you.

Kate Aldrich 38:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

Desire it anyway.

Kate Aldrich 38:32

That's so good.

Brad Aldrich 38:33

Desire is disruptive, it's an important thing, but that doesn't mean it's bad.

Kate Aldrich 38:37

Yeah, I love that.

Brad Aldrich 38:39

It was really good. You talk in the book about three um patterns of sabotage that I think every couple is gonna go, yeah, of course. I I see them all the time. We you know, we have sabotage happening all the time. My wife just did this, my husband did this. Um, but you're connecting them to desire, I think is what's radically different. Can say a little bit about how those sabotage methods are are connected or disconnected from desire. Yeah, like is there one that you would want to well, you mentioned what uh emotional immaturity, uh dysfunctional conflict and escape hatches, yeah. And I think I would say, I mean, obviously all of them, but I think the escape hatches is something we all have have heard so much about. Oh, my wife is constantly on her phone, or my husband's you know looking at porn or you know, having an affair, or like these things that draw us away from intimacy in the marriage. I I think most people would come to this going, if you had desire, you wouldn't be escaping on your phone all the time. How do you, yeah, how do you connect those?

SPEAKER_02 40:04

Yeah, so it I think all of us have these escape patches in our life. I think intimacy is so much more difficult than any of us could ever imagine. And, you know, one of the concepts that I'm working and weaving through this intimacy section in the book is uh this concept that I first heard from Dan Alender about uh basically marital uh DMZs. And so think about like a demilitarized zone of you know North and South Korea. It's a buffer that you know looks like peace, but it actually keeps intense conflict at bay. And every couple has those marital DMZs. It could be around in-laws, could be around sex, could be around finances, but there's some sense of, okay, I will not bother you here if you don't bother me with my sacred cow and I won't bother yours. And so you just end up developing some DMZ and you don't want to explore it. Well, part of that is the reason why we want DMZs is because we don't want to deal with conflict. Uh, engaging conflict and disruption in your marriage burns a lot of calories, and the brain is always conditioned to burn as few calories as possible. Therefore, some conflict is gonna be there, but mostly it's gonna be a slow drift because you can't stay in the red zone, you can't stay kind of angry. I know probably some Italians are like, actually, you can stay a little longer than most people, but there's gonna be some pattern of dissociation. So we have that hybrid of just difficulty in marriage. We also have, you know, phone-based childhoods. We have average American on TV four or five hours a day, social media. Like, I don't know how many thousands of times we touch our phone each day. Um, but we are distracted consistently. Like we live in an age of consistent cognitive degradation. Yeah, we are always switching tasks. So I think we bring all of that unresolved stuff into our marriage. So um, that's part of the provocation of marriage is to be able to say, if we did not engage this escape patch, what would we have to confront in our own marriage? But also what would we have to confront in an unlived life? And I I think of squatters, like when my wife and I moved from one rental house to another in Seattle, we had kind of both leases for like four days as we were moving stuff out. And within two days of leaving one rental, a squatter had shown up and was living in our previous home. And just that sense of like squatters, a good squatter will know that there's an unlived house within a couple hours. And a lot of us are those unlived houses where we have never laid claim to this is my life, this is my passion, this is the meaning of my life. And when you don't know who you are, you will find escape patches to not deal with intimacy, but also to not deal with the parts of your life that you haven't laid claim to.

Kate Aldrich 43:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:26

That's that's intense.

Brad Aldrich 43:28

And I think that is a charge that I felt throughout this book of we have to figure out who we are. We have to figure out where your desire is, where it goes, where it should go, how do you bless it and see it play out in this place that desire is good. And you keep coming back to this idea of desire is good. How do we use it well?

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot. I didn't put this in the book, but just the I've been thinking a lot about desire just through the concept of, you know, the parable of the talents that, you know, this this master gives people so many talents. And what are you going to do with them? And there's a lot of people that bury their talents and don't begin to uh grow them, don't begin to invest their talents, they just bury them. And that's where the master has some of the harshest words. And so that that's really the invitation of I think a life is to be able to study your life, to be able to say, like, what has the God of the universe put inside of my heart? Like, where do I come alive? Annie Dillard says, I never knew I was a bell until the moment I was lifted up and struck. And so just that invitation of where in the moments, it could be in your marriage or in your personal life, where like something inside of you just rings and you're like, that's what I'm made for. Well, I think those are talents, those are desires that have been placed into us that need to be developed. And so we're not serving ourselves, our partner, or God by suppressing and burying our desires. Um, so I don't think it's possible to have too high of regard for the desires inside of us. Yeah.

Kate Aldrich 45:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:29

That's amazing.

Kate Aldrich 45:30

It is. It's good.

Brad Aldrich 45:32

And I will say, reading through this book, like there is so much here that I think all of us can learn about ourselves and our journey. And I would just uh, you know, whether it's in relationships or or not, uh, you know, we focused, I think, a little bit more on the relationship portions of of this book just because of what we are in this, but you talk a lot about just understanding this idea of who we are and who we are in terms of desire. I, you know, I just really appreciate um everything that you've brought to this. I think there's a lot here that people can learn and and grow with. I'm curious, just as we're kind of wrapping up our conversation today, Jay, what what's giving you hope right now as as you're kind of launching this book and seeing, you know, you're still working with clinically with couples, you're doing a lot of research. What's giving you hope today?

SPEAKER_02 46:36

Yeah, I would say hope has been I spoke to this a little bit earlier with regard to being in a midlife crisis, midlife chrysalis. And part of the idea that I've been working through is when I was recording the audio for Desire, I was walking into Random House and I looked down at a crosswalk and I saw this quarter. And on top of the quarter was an image of Ellis Island. And, you know, New York City, Ellis Island. Uh, the reason why I'm talking about that now is I had just met with some of my mom's extended family, and we are basically uh my ancestors were immigrants from Sweden, uh, probably back in like 1890s, early 1900s, and so many of them had come through Ellis Island and then settled out in Duluth, Minnesota, of all places. So I'm just like thinking about like leaving penniless, and they had to buy like a round trip ticket, and it was seen a little bit like fraud from the shipping lines of like, why are these people needing a you know round trip passage when everybody knew they were leaving hardship? And so they would arrive penniless and then, you know, try and make their life work in an exceedingly cold climate. And so as I kind of picked up that quarter, that was with me all week as I was recording the book, was that sense of we think a lot about desire as it relates to our own personal life, our own marriage, to some degree our children. But I started grappling with the image of my great-grandfather's face of being able to say, you know, was it hardship that he was leaving, a desire to escape financial difficulty, a desire for a new start, maybe a little bit of all of it. Uh, but there I was in New York City recording a book on desire because of the desires of my ancestors. And it just really made me in a way hopeful of like, what does it mean for us to do all this work, not just to have better lives, better marriages, better families, but really we're doing this to become good ancestors as well. And so that's been a pivot. And again, I don't know if that's just part of the the crucible of midlife, but like, why am I here? What am I doing here? And you know, 20s and 30s, I had a lot of ambition, desire to kind of change conversations and disrupt the world. And now it's that sense of like how can desire actually form us into really good ancestors as well. That's awesome.

Kate Aldrich 49:23

I love that. I love that you got to the disruption too.

SPEAKER_04 49:26

Yes.

Kate Aldrich 49:27

That you needed.

Brad Aldrich 49:29

Yes. And I just want to say I've had uh, you know, over the last what five, six years here, seeing your first book, Unwanted, um, help so many people move from this place of not just freedom from pornography and unwanted sexual behaviors, but but truly a place of a freedom for something else, freedom for exploring and seeing more in their life than they knew was even possible. And I've seen that happen firsthand. And so reading this, that theme is throughout this book of there is more, and I'm just really excited to see what happens next as you know, people maybe even a different, larger audience gets to a hold of some of these ideas that go, huh? Okay, desire, like maybe there is some freedom here to actually figure out what's next.

SPEAKER_02 50:33

Yeah, I love that. Um I hope so. That is part of the hope is how do we move from that sense of you know, just freedom from like all of us have places of misery and problems. It could be porn, could be conflicts, could be exhaustion, emptiness, loneliness. But it's really that sense of, you know, why are we doing all this work? Like, why do we dive into our story? Why do we do this difficult, at times brutal work of self-confrontation? And it's really for that sense of freedom for. So, you know, this podcast does not exist without desire. A book doesn't exist without desire. So what in the world are you, listener, depriving the world of because you're not embracing desire? Because you are not, you know, wanting a freedom from, like, we have to have that. Like, what do you want freedom from? But really, what's your freedom for? And what gift, what boon are you going to create through the complexity, through the difficulty, through the agony of your life that you will actually bring to the world to bless it? And it that's a tough task. It's a tough invitation. So it is, as you all have said it, it desire for me has been a more difficult book to process, to read. It's bigger, it's thicker, um, and it needs to be taken. You need to take time with it. But it it for me, it is beginning to alter me in ways that I just had not ever anticipated. That's awesome.

Brad Aldrich 52:13

Wow. Well, we're gonna leave it there. I with that last question. I hope you truly wrestle with some of those questions. And I really hope that you pick up the book. Um, it's available now in all bookstores. You can get it anywhere. There'll be a link in the show notes. The book again is desire, the longings inside us, and the new science of how we love, heal, and grow. Thank you so much, Jay. It's just been an honor to have you back on the show and just really excited to see what happens next.

unknown 52:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:48

Thank you, Brad. Thank you, Kate. Thank you for your desires.

SPEAKER_04 52:55

Still Becoming One is a production of Aldrich Ministries. For more information about Brad and Kate's coaching ministry, courses, and speaking opportunities, you can find us at Aldridge Ministries.com. For podcast show notes and links to resources in all of our social media, be sure to visit us at stillbecoming one dot com. And don't forget to like this episode wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to follow us to continue your journey on Still Becoming One.